Tag: Microsoft Surface Tablet

Perfect Tool for a Tablet

The world of personal computing has turned to tablets. It’s easy to see the reason why; they are powerful, portable, and ready to compute as fast as you can push the button to turn it on.

When the first highly usable tablet was introduced (i.e. the iPad), there has been wide skepticism about its usefulness and capability. Now, the tablets are being adopted by schools as a replacement for books and paper assignments.

In the old wold of books and paper, it has been a common practice to use a pen or a pencil to mark paper in a quest of making a mark on the world. The introduction of higher level of technology, surprisingly, has devolved us to using fingers to smear the screen with sweat and pixels. Even though a civilized hand held device exists, known as a stylus, most of us opt for using the finger. It’s simply easier to use one of our appendages rather than finding a small-single-function tool in the crevices of a purse, pocket, or some other obscure opening.

The mystery behind disappearance of small objects such as USB flash drives, Styli, microfilm, and other less interesting items may never be known; however making a device more useful is another matter. Maybe if you use it more often, you’ll remember where you last left it.

Behold. The USB flash drive and a Stylus in one!

Stylus with Flash Drive build in. It’s 2.75 inches in length.

The Stylus is very compact at only 2.75 inches in length. The soft rubberized point is at about 0.25 inches in width. It’s easy to slide the USB flash drive connector out for a fast connection to the Surface tablet or any other USB compatible device.

Capacitive Technology at Your Fingertips

This particular stylus is designed to be used on capacitive screens found in iPads, Surface tablets, Smartphones, and other gadgets with modern screens. While it may work with resistive (older screen technology) screens, it would not be recommended due to the soft rubberized tip.

The previous photo shows an all plastic case. The large plastic surface area allows for durable silk-screen printing of logos and text. However, If you are not familiar with the capacitive technology, all plastic case presents a problem. In order for the Stylus to work without any batteries, a conductor, such as your finger, must be utilized so that the screen recognizes it as input. The problem is easily solved with stylish conductive ridges on the back side of the Stylus.

When your finger is placed over the ridges on the Stylus, it’s enabled to work on your touch screen device. It’s light, ergonomic, and precise due to the 0.25 inch tip. Also, the area above the ridges can be silk-screened with your logo or text in addition to the larger area on the front of the Stylus.

Make the Stylus Yours

I typically prefer and tend to recommend multifunction USB flash drives. Such items as USB Lanyards, Wristbands, Pens, and other multifunction drives are a much better value from the promotional as well as practical point of view. The more functionality the device has, the more chance it has to be used, and therefore seen with your brand or company logo.

The Stylus is a perfect blend of modern functionality. It’s a writing tool for modern tablets, and compact storage for up to 16GB worth of data. It’s beautifully designed and has plenty of space for branding on the front as well as the back.

Make the Stylus yours by choosing your color, capacity, and packaging options (if needed). We’ll take care of silk-screening your brand name or company logo on the Stylus as well as pre-loading the USB flash drive for you.

I never knew that USB flash drives were gone

The personal computing devices have become increasingly fragmented (no pun intended). The good old PC has become a professional device – not intended for the masses. The need for great computing power is just not required for everyday tasks of writing documents, updating posts, watching a video, or even video conferencing (chat). The graphical chips (GPUs graphical processing unit) and central processing chips (CPU) have gotten fast enough for these common tasks. More performance is desired only by pros who need to operate tools to achieve specialized tasks in the information technology, R&D, or development fields.

Even with a portable version of a PC being a notebook/laptop/ultrabook, the race to create faster and more powerful units with large hi def screens, created products with fantastic computing performance; just the same as the performance of incredible battery drain.

A better product with good performance, mobility, and long battery life was desperately needed. Though, many people were skeptical, Apple was able to answer to the need with the iPad. Unfortunate to the USB devices industry as well as many who use USB devices, the iPad’s exclusion of the USB port meant bad news. With incredible adaptation of the iPad coupled with the Cloud ideology, the future of the USB devices was questionable at best.

Microsoft and Google To The Rescue!

Apple’s iPad was great news to the mobile and causal user; not so much for the USB industry or users of USB devices. The reasons of excluding one of the most widely used ports on a personal computing device could be various. It may make sense to limit the device to encourage users to integrate into the vast Apple’s app and cloud infrastructure. It also can make sense that the USB port would add cost and possibly adversely affect the look of the device. No matter what the reason was, without competition, iPad could be anything Apple wanted it to be.

Google had their answer back in 2011 in a package of a laptop – the Chromebook. The initiative was more of a feasibility study of the Google Chrome OS rather than an answer to the Apple’s iPad. However, the Surface tablet by Microsoft, just a few weeks before this post, is a great contender. Microsoft threw complete support for the USB 3.0 interface in the Windows 8 operating system.

With the new Chromebook models coming from Google backed by Samsung and Acer, and Surface tablet from Microsoft, the competition is starting to heat up. With the inclusion of the USB ports in the Chromebook as well as the Surface tablet, the USB devices have been offered another chance.

It is fortunate that folks at Microsoft and Google see the benefit of the versatile USB technology as a way to expand and enrich their devices. It’s our job as users to see if this technology still makes sense in the highly mobile world. What makes me glad is that the technological titans that are Google and Microsoft realize that the needs of the end-users drive the technology forward rather than Apple’s ideology of telling the end-users what it should be.

Conclusion

Some may say that USB devices, especially storage devices, are a way of the past. With the mentality of Cloud computing, it may seem as true. However, people still like having the data nearby and readily available regardless of the connectivity to the Cloud. The privacy of the Cloud services is a major issue as well. For those who see value in storing the data locally, with privacy, and having immediate availability through an easy USB port, rejoice – USB is back!